On Sep 12, 2012, at 8:31 , David Wainberg <david@networkadvertising.org> wrote:
> If it were a status qualifier alongside a,c,f,l, and r, it might make sense. However, I still feel strongly that, absent a definition for tracking itself, we need to excise the word "tracking" from all of those definitions. Without a definition of tracking, how can a party state that it is "not tracking except for....?" The party might be able to state "the only permitted use we are claiming is X," in which case it might also be able to say, "we are claiming no permitted uses." This is with the caveat that since the qualifiers are optional, it must be clear that silence is just silence and does not indicate any claims whatsoever.
I think the original motivation went well beyond "no permitted uses". It was for sites such as ones hosting script libraries, or web badges, or humdrum sites that don't use analytics or advertising, and who simply aren't interested in anything other than the most basic logging (visitor counts, pages served, and so on), to be able to say "look, tracking is not even on our radar; we're out of scope."
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> On 9/12/12 12:51 AM, Nicholas Doty wrote:
>> Hi David,
>>
>> On Sep 11, 2012, at 3:16 PM, David Wainberg <david@networkadvertising.org> wrote:
>>> Moreover, how are we going to define "anonymous" or "pseudonymous" or "foo"? Given that this is an unnecessary appendage anyway, and that we can't even define "tracking" in a "do not track" standard, why do we want to create the problem of now having to define some other state. To include it without a definition would be unacceptable.
>> I think we're agreed on defining the terms we use in the specification and communicate to users. It sounds like part of your concern here is that we would need to define new terminology and that that would be confusing. Would just providing the no-permitted-uses communication satisfy this concern [0]? This wouldn't be new terminology, just optional transparency back to the user about claimed permitted uses.
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>> The group has already agreed on including the capability to claim which permitted uses in a machine-readable way, and I think Shane has made the case that transparency about claimed permitted uses is one of the key advantages of this specification.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Nick
>>
>> [0] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-tracking/2012Sep/0115.html
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David Singer
Multimedia and Software Standards, Apple Inc.